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Peloponnesian folk melodies from the 78 rpm era, captured in 1945 by two Greek immigrant musicians—a cymbalom player and lauto accompanist—whose lives traced the familiar arc from early-century recording artists to working-class obscurity. The music itself sits between old-country dance traditions and the realities of American urban life: clear-toned, unhurried, recorded without studio embellishment, a document of what Greek-American communities actually played when nobody was looking back. Rassias and Asimakopoulos were prolific session men who had already faded from the record industry by the time these sides were cut; this feels less like revival than residue, which is precisely what makes it worth hearing.
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We know that the cymbalom player on these recordings was Louis (Elias) Rassias who was born in May 1884 and arrived from Sparta, Greece to New York City in August 1900. He was married in Detroit in 1917 to his wife Stella (aka Stavroula, b. 1896; d. 1968). In the early 1920s, he recorded prolifically as an accompanist to the folk singers Koula Antonopoulou and Stotirios Stasinopoulos, and between November 1928 and October 1931, he cut 13 instrumental performances released under his own name, issued as 12" discs by Okeh and Columbia. (One of those tunes, "Angelos," he re-recorded on these sessions.) He died in Manhattan April 27, 1958, age 72.
Our best guess is that the lauto player is Epamenondas Asikmakopoulos whose life took a similar path to Rassias. He was born May 10, 1883 in (or around) Nemea, about 100km north of Sparta, and arrived October 1903 through Ellis Island. He married his wife Athena (who was born in Springfield, Missouri) in Youngstown, Ohio in 1918. He recorded three discs for the small, independent Greek Record Company and Olympus labels in Chicago in the early ‘20s. When he filed his Declaration of Intent to become a U.S. citizen in 1924, he had Americanized his first name to Peter and gave his occupation as musician, but by 1930, he was living in a boarding house in West Philadelphia and working at a laundry. He died in San Francisco January 30, 1960, age 76.
We know nothing at this time about the clarinet player whose name is given on the discs’ labels simply as “Stratos.”
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